GREETINGS

Hi, I'm Justin Hall and this here is a personal web site I've used to chronicle my time on earth since 1994. The content on the front page is relatively recent; if you search through the archives, you'll find old pieces of Justin. Recently I was CEO of an online games company GameLayers - now I'm "Director of Culture & Communications" with DeNA in San Francisco, a mobile phone entertainment company! Some folks have indexed my doings on Wikipedia.

I faltered in my forward health; I caught a cold last Monday 2 March and basically it knocked me out. I was either coughing, leaking, wheezing, honking, aching or stoned for most of the last week.

I postponed an interview for The Justin Hall Show. For video work, I managed to spend much of my upright computer time simulating the way "checking email" looked in 1994 by rebuilding the Eudora Mac interface in Apple's Motion 5. That has resulted in a much improved 5 seconds of footage in my 2315 second film; .2 percent. Bit by bit, I'm gonna finish this thing! Whether or not I can find the Mishawaka Font.

Poking through my archives for ever more footage to adorn my documentary, I found tiny video files - interviews that I did in 2000 when I was employed at Gamers.com.

Probably the best media artifact here is the recording from Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia July 2000 - for fans of science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and other elements of fan culture. I found this paragraph describing a third millennium A.D. machine box ride with both the armies of Christ and the children of Satan:

It turns out that the Salvation Army is having its 135-year anniversary in Atlanta at the same time as Dragon*Con. So there's 20,000 suited servants of the lord sharing the streets with Stormtroopers. They are both in the same Hyatt hotel too - I get on an elevator with two ladies from Denmark in their sixties, dressed in Salvation army garb with shoulder epaulets, and then two young ladies board wearing dog collars, large black feathered wings, vampire teeth and red contact lenses. It's an ideal nonviolent culture clash.

I spent US Presidents Day 2015 at the International Cannabis Business Conference. I went there to see how http://bud.com might participate in legalization. I didn't intend to make a video, but afterwards enough people were curious about attending a "cannabis business conference" I decided to put together my reflections on this event in video form:

The first glimpse of this "stolen wallet, mystery bag" moving picture went to people who shine the light of their hearts and treasures on my creations. But if your funds are tight, fret not, this particular less-controversial, less-impactful, less-produced personal media object shall soon be was hurled free onto a public web that shall remain floating near your eyes as long as I can keep the lights on!!

internet video busking

16 January I passed $200 in funds supporting each episode of the Justin Hall Show on Patreon. Holy smokes! It's been 8 months since I published an episode so I'm feeling especially honored that people would still think their money might someday support something. Since May 2014, without promotion or publishing content, the Justin Hall show gained an average of 2 new patrons a month and went up $29 in per-video pledges. Gracias amigos!!!

Community financial support for my personal video work validates some of my early excitement around "publishing empowerment". Now people surfing the media streams tie their attention and wallets to my teeth! These mounting pledges nudge me to live up to the hope that each dollar represents: the hope that we'll share another media moment.

I wondered, is this particular video too informal for my audience? Too long? Too mundane? This "stolen wallet, mystery bag" video is more casual than the films I produced in 2014. I recorded it in one take, on short notice with my hair miskempt. As I work to address two issues in my links.net documentary and polish that giant pile of excitement, I enjoy having a chance to get loose with the video medium. Hopefully it might amuse or gently provoke some folks across the web.

To get some perspective, I dropped in on personal video-maker Jenna Marbles. Her videos feature far fewer graphics and effects than mine, maybe a few more stunts, a lot more cute animals. But at the core, she strikes one as direct, unafraid and it's somehow comforting to watch her think out loud. I admire her accessible, self-deprecating fun and authentic momentum. I watched her 200th video which offered some insight into her feelings after the last four years riding a rocketship of popularity.

Jenna Marbles is one of the most popular personal media makers on the internet, and I could see the positive and negative aspects of her prominent position from those two vids linked above. Every few months I start thinking, oh, I should get some comments and community going again on Links.net! But personal content + open comments = eventual tide of immense psychic challenge, and I'm not ready for that just now.

These are some of the themes I'm exploring in 20links.vhx.tv - my links.net documentary due free on the web later this year. It's taking me a good while to figure out how I feel about the rise of social networks after the advent of personal weblogging, let alone articulate that feeling!

I'm told the prior resident here snuck over a fence behind this Mission district house into a garden attached to an auto body shop. He planted a black acacia tree there decades ago. When the tree became an overgrowing arboreal menace, it was chopped to a stump. He the planter prayed and meditated hard that day. The stump was ignored and over the ensuing years, the tree grew back without supervision: as seven trunks, a huge canopy three stories tall, visible from San Francisco's hills and sheltering the spaces below which bustled with hawks and rats.

As more people packed around it, the tree was deemed too large: roots were lifting a neighbor's concrete; limbs or whole trunks might have broken off to commit rooficide.

I loved looking out our back window and seeing branches and leaves. Now, a year and a half after I first moved a chair to where I could sit and see that tree, three days of chainsawing by a man on ropes reduced it to a stump once more. Younger men covered the wood wound in mulch and left it.

Ilyse and I wondered if tree-bound meditation and prayer should once again be deployed, touching upon the spiritual side of the otherwise secular Arbor Day, which appears in 40+ countries. Perhaps we'd pray for forgetfulness from our neighbors, so the stump might re-re-grow. And, we'd likely raise our voices amidst the many in this part of the world praying for water.

But instead of bringing rain, our water prayers could cause sea levels to rise to our front steps. And instead of summoning leaves outside our window, this tree could continue to invade our lives. Fed by our prayers and meditation, this tree could soon drive us from this warm box. Seems easy to cut and hard to know. But out my window I do prefer branches and leaves to the rump end of a storehouse.